This March, in the month of International Women’s Day, the human rights community mourned the loss of one of Iraq’s most courageous voices. In fact, on 2 March 2026, Yanar Mohammed, feminist, activist, and President of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), was assassinated at her home in Baghdad as two armed men opened fire on her inside her residence. Her killing is a reminder of the price that women human rights defenders continue to pay for their courage.
Yanar Mohammed co-founded OWFI in 2003, after Saddam Hussein’s fall, with the mission to promote women’s rights and combat gender-based violence in one of the world’s most challenging environments. Over more than two decades, she built a network of safe houses across Iraq, sheltering hundreds of women fleeing domestic abuse, forced marriage, trafficking, and so-called “honour” killings.
She was a tireless advocate for gender equality and universal human rights, denouncing sexual violence as a weapon of war, the impunity of armed groups, and systemic discrimination against women and minorities. Her work was also internationally recognised, in 2016, as she was awarded the Norwegian Rafto Prize for Human Rights. Recently she focused her actions towards Yazidi women and other survivors of ISIS-related abuses, demanding accountability for crimes that too often go unpunished.
She carried out all of this while receiving repeated death threats, at times in the past she was forced to restrict her own movements. In 2020, she and OWFI faced legally questionable judicial proceedings linked to the organisation’s operation of women’s shelters, part of a general trend of pressure against those defending women’s rights in Iraq. Her death follows also years of online hate speech and incitement directed at her and at women’s rights defenders more broadly, incitement that too often goes unaddressed and unpunished.
This March, between the commemoration of International Women’s Day and the news of Yanar Mohammed’s death, we are reminded of the bravery of those who defend rights knowing the risks they face.
